Gitex Dubai City Visualisation

This a project for Marshmallow Laser Feast, I worked as a developer, with Felix Faire. Basically it’s a visualisation of Dubai the city, with real data overlayed, trying to tell stories with that data, on a gargantuan LED screen with black mirror polished floor and ceiling.

The visuals were made in Cinder, a C++ open-source artists toolkit, which I had never used til this project, which turns out to be extremely rad. We needed a lot of performance, and cinder is good at that.

You could interact with the installation in a rudimentary way by waving your hand above a plinth to select options and to tilt your view of the virtual city. Hand sensing was done with a leap motion sensor which saved me from writing any computer vision code, so I was happy! I also wrote a procedural sound engine that you can configure with XML and WAV files.

There were a lot of cinematic camera movements around this data-city space, and for this I made a script to allow Cinema 4D animators to control the realtime visuals and camera position directly from Cinema4D, rather than having to use some shonky tool we would have had to cobble together to do it all in the visuals app.

The installation was in a room with mirror polished floor and ceiling – here’s the word INSTALLATION on the screen so you can see the effect of the reflection.

Video credit: Felix Faire
Client: Prisme International
Agency: Marshmallow Laser Feast
Developers: Marek Bereza, Felix Faire